Bloggasm

I don’t have health insurance.

The newspaper I work for offers a plan, but I’ve been putting off signing up for it in favor of saving a buck. I have rent and other expenses every month, and like millions of other Americans in their 20s, I’ve been arrogant and put health insurance at the bottom of my priority list just so I can feel comfortable with my expenses.

NY Magazine has published an article about people like me: A Generation Uninsured, and it’s scary. It begins with an anecdote about a person named Andrew Ondrejcak who wakes up with a sharp pain in his side, and rather than going to see a doctor, he tries to ride it out. It describes his own mental agonizing over how to find a doctor while uninsured, how much it’s going to cost him, and the hassle of having to eventually be rushed to the hospital.

Like I said, as someone who could very well be placed in his situation, it’s scary. I think at the end of this month I’m going to make it a priority to join up with the company plan finally and get it over with.

Sorry for not posting anything for a few days. Life has been hectic. Regularly-scheduled programming to resume tomorrow.

Oh my God. It doesn’t get any funnier than this:

Matthews grilled DeLay about passages in his book where he apparently ripped into fellow corrupt Texan Dick Armey, eventually asking the Hammer about describing Armey as “drunk with ambition.” DeLay denied writing that. “I wrote that he was ‘blinded by his ambition.’” Matthews starts flipping though the book and finds the “drunk with ambition” quote and reads it to Bug Man. And DeLay keeps denying it. Finally, Chris hands the book to Tom and tells him to read it himself. DeLay looks down, pauses, and says “I don’t have my glasses.” What a clown. That’s beyond lying. It’s delusional.

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The NY Times has an article detailing the amount of visitor traffic a Web 2.0 site would have to have in order to generate $50 million a year in online ad revenue, enough to support a full-time staff of people just like any offline media company. It turns out that you need a ton of users.

It predicts that you would need anywhere from 200 million to 4 billion page views a month, depending on what kind of site you’re running. To understand how hard that would be, in order to get 4 billion page views a month, you’d be one of the 10 most-visited websites on the web.

It concludes that as of right now, the best way to make a living through online advertising is to run a business with only a few people, one without much overhead. Or you can charge for subcriptions or other services. And I’m pretty much okay with this notion, that the internet is a democracy of sorts, a plethora of one-man operations that add up to a major sector of the media.

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The Los Angeles Times published an interesting profile article on Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo, and the role it played in bringing the US Attorney scandal to the mainstream media:

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room’s perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment.

The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet. Most newsrooms are notably noisy places, full of shrill phones and quacking reporters. Here there is mainly quiet, except for the clacking keyboards.

It’s 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

via whatever

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Haha, this is great. It’s part of a Brazilian coffee company’s ad campaign.

via boingboing